Siri + Yelp = Useless Google (Week 4)

As I was searching through various places for a target for my weekly bashing, I came across a headline entitled "Siri + Yelp = Useless Google." OK, there is more to it, but that was the point at which it had my attention.

When I actually read through the article, I found that it was highlighting how poorly the results were when someone used Siri (a voice recognition software) in combination with Yelp (a restaurant rating service) on an Apple 4S phone (woohoo - a bonus bash for me). At this point, dashed were my hopes that two software midgets had teamed up to slay the evil monolith Google. Siri is actually the "assistant" on an Apple 4S phone (Am I the only one that I didn't know this? Probably.)

I won't get into the details (follow the link below if you are interested), but what happened was the user got a Google map that gave them an address and a phone number. The user had expected to get more information about the restaurant selected. Furthermore, the user was trapped because Siri has no ability to go back. In order to try to search again the user had to start over. Clearly, this wasn't working as the user had wanted.

The difficulty arose from the fact that the user had spoken "places to eat" into the phone when searching rather than "restaurants." Part of the issue is in how Google handled the "natural language" search compared to if the user had typed in "restaurants" and part of the issue is in how the user spoke in his search request.

There are two things I want to discuss:

First, while voice recognition is an emerging technology, is it ready for prime time? I have seen it work quite well in other situations, so I will say "yes." However, when we see these technologies merged with other apps (as in this case), do they work well? I'll back down to "sometimes." So how can a developer be expected to make this voice recognition software work as expected when combined with so many other possible apps? Is it unreasonable to expect things made by different developers (and by different companies) to work together flawlessly? And is the goal to make everything work together easily or should a company "capture" a customer by saying "if you want to be able to use my Feature A, you'll have to buy my set of X, Y, and Z (often the more profitable model to the company)?

Secondly, when building a service like Google Search, is it more important to be able to search in "natural language" (as is most convenient for the user) or should users adapt to the style that allows the machine to work most efficiently? Which is more important, the man or the machine?

NOTE: before we go any further, I want to state that I think Google makes a very good search engine. I'm not trying to bash them here.

and now for the ENTERTAINMENT:

A mother and her ten year old daughter are driving to the daughter's dance lesson when the daughter figures out how to use the voice recognition software on her phone to "type in" her text messages without having to actually do any typing. She then just says "send" and off goes the text to her bff Abby. Her mother says "won't it be cool when Abby gets a phone smart enough to do that too and you don't even have to say 'send.' Before you know it you'll be able to just talk back and forth." The daughter then replies "you're so silly mommy, that technology is probably years away."

Anyway, here is the link: http://searchengineland.com/why-siri-yelp-google-maps-iphone-4s-96976